4x IM Journey

Intro:
Just left my full-time job (worked in a big company that does Paid Social Media Advertising for even bigger companies - not just Facebook, but Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn too). Even though the money was great, working 50+ hours/week for someone else that is not me made me miserable, also, going to the same office every single day sucks. So, i decided to leave, and try to make money from where-ever and only use my laptop for it. I should mention that currently I have 0 clients, 0 social media accounts, 0 streams of income, but all of that is about to change.

WTF does 4x mean?
4x refers to the 4 parts/components of this journey:
Part 1: AdSense Blog / Website with the occasional CPA / Product page
Part 2: "Free" CPA
Part 3: Paid CPA (Facebook Ads, Google PPC)
Part 4: Offering Services / Consulting

Why Am I Starting This Journey
While waiting for my hosting to connect to the domain I decided to put everything in written form + if I manage to motivate someone to do something similar, it's a small win already. However, there are 3 selfish reasons too:
- Networking - find people on similar journeys that I can share with
- Note Keeping - I'll be sharing my thoughts on ideas/problems/opportunities on the journey so that they don't go unwritten. I've had my fair share of ideas lost.
- Public Shaming - nothing stings more than "you got any of those updates" or "another dead journey", so I'll make sure I don't get any of those

Goals
The main goal is longevity. I don't have a number like $xxx daily in mind, I just want to be able to pay for the bills and have a more relaxed life (I won't complain if i make a killing and make 6 figures monthly either ) I'll consider this a success If I am profitable ofc, but mainly to keep pushing till the end of the year, even if I make $0 out of it.

Outro:
That pretty much wraps it, in the beginning I'll update this thread daily with what's on the To-Do list, what I need to do and so on. After everything is set, I'll update you with the numbers (followers / income..)

Good luck in your journey! Keep us updated.

Good luck on your journey! Very interesting. I will follow this.
Please keep us updated daily.

Pre-Update:

Part 1: Ad Sense Website
What I have:
- hosting
- domain
- theme

What I need to do:
- build the website structure (logo, structure, categories...)
- install plugins (i'll keep it clean here, as little as possible)
- create all social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest)
- write 15-25 articles (3-5 for each category) to "fill the site"
- apply for Ad Sense, Rev Content, Content Ad.. (Ad Sense is the priority, but having alternatives can't do harm)

**The initial set-up phase is complete when all of the things above are done. That is when the first update will be.

I'll set a deadline to complete the things above this week (Sunday 23:59). I don't know how much time it will take since its been a while since I made a website + I expect writing the articles to be a pain. The first 15-25 articles will be lower quality, and I will not be making Pinterest Graphics and YouTube/Facebook videos for them, or any creative for any social media.

Part 2: Free CPA - TBA
Part 3: Paid CPA - TBA

Part 4: Offering Services / Counseling
Think of creative ways to land clients (except cold messaging them on LinkedIn of course, which works - however I hate LinkedIn).
After the Part 1 set-up is done and i can "work" on part 1, that is when I start working on part 4 too.
**I will NOT be signing up on freelance sites.

This is gonna be a great journey. You should be used to working under pressure hence doing four projects at a time might not be a problem.

I am looking to secure a job too ASAP, IM pays me better but still I just wanna get used to working under pressure. LOL!

The "why am I starting this journey" section of this truly made me laugh, man. I hope you succeed, cheers.

Cardaish said:

Good luck in your journey! Keep us updated.

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cpadivergent said:

Good luck on your journey! Very interesting. I will follow this.
Please keep us updated daily.

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PHPInjected said:

The "why am I starting this journey" section of this truly made me laugh, man. I hope you succeed, cheers.

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Thanks!

HAkorehdeh said:

This is gonna be a great journey. You should be used to working under pressure hence doing four projects at a time might not be a problem.

I am looking to secure a job too ASAP, IM pays me better but still I just wanna get used to working under pressure. LOL!

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I was into IM before, and made good money from it, but took the job to "learn to work". There are things you learn at 9-5 jobs: Working when you don't feel like it, actually working (before the job i used to think i worked 8h/day from home, turns out i actively worked only 1-2 hours)... If you can't find the positives, at least you'll have something to motivate you to keep pushing this IM thing, because if you don't succeed, its back to 9-5, and we don't want that

before the job i used to think i worked 8h/day from home, turns out i actively worked only 1-2 hours

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Sounds familiar Watching your journey

The benefit of having worked for an advertising agency in your case is that you most likely know the hoops and loops of IM. Good luck man!

Hey OP, a small hint just in case you might not know that, from my experience working with long tail, low competition keywords is the way to get started in order to see the ROI on the inversted time and effort. The worst thing is to get involved in the project, work long and get no results, it's the easiest way to get burned out. It's quite easy to get your kws ranked in top10 with little to no effort, but you have to focus on h1,h2,h3 tags, long content with images and proper percentage of keywords inserted in the article. If you work with WordPress, take your time to set up properly Yoast SEO plugin with focus keyword, meta description and image alts to get the "green" indicators from the plugin. This plugin will help a lot to let you know everything is in line with onsite seo. I'm in no way affiliated with this plugin authors, the plugin simply does the job very nicely, that's why I wanted to mention that. Good luck on your journey OP, lot's of organic, high converting traffic. Cheers !

Solid plan, and you have experience. It shouldn't be so hard for you. Good luck.

Update 1:

Here is what i needed to do for this week:
- build the website structure (logo, structure, categories...) ✔
- install plugins (i'll keep it clean here, as little as possible) ✔
- create all social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest) ✔ (decided to skip Instagram - no direct linking)
- write 15-25 articles (3-5 for each category) to "fill the site" ✔ (15 articles, 5 categories x3 articles)
- apply for Ad Sense, Rev Content, Content Ad.. (Ad Sense is the priority, but having alternatives can't do harm) - X - will apply in a week or so, after i get at least some traction.
- finish all of this by 23:59 / Time of writing this post 00:19. This one gets a yellow color since it took me more than 20 minutes to find the right shade of green. and red. and yellow.

22 July - 28 July To-Do:
On-Site:
- 5 categories x 1 article per category = 5 articles daily, x7 days = 35 articles for this week - 500+ words original content (original = it needs to pass the copyscape test )
- Pinterest Graphic For All Articles = 35 graphics
- Videos for each article //not sure if i can do this, nor how i will do it, however i'll give my best and keep you updated guys
Traffic:
- Get into Pinterest group boards (buy my way in if needed)
- Pin like crazy
- Post the videos on YouTube with keywords (don't expect much from this, but we'll see how it goes)
- Learn about Reddit, test what i learned

Investments: (rounded numbers)
Hosting: $100
Domain: $10
WP Theme: $40 (I am not satisfied with it, may change it with a new one) - if someone has Foodica by WPZoom kindly share it
Total Investment: -$150

This week's goals: (not sure how well i set the goal for this week, but the goals for the future weeks will be more...educated)
- 1,000 website visitors
- 300 Pinterest followers

I'll write a mini mid week update focusing on the goals (probably Thursday) and the "full" one on Sunday.

Nice to see that you want multiple sources of income from start. Good luck.

Cool. Will be interesting to see what sort of traffic you get from pinterest. When done right it's the fastest free way to get to a few hundred daily uv. Are you pinning using a brand new account?

Interesting journey thread OP. Have you got emergency funding for at least 3-6 months to cover your costs while you grow your business?

cool journey will follow